Montgomery Place

Richard Montgomery was one of the first heroes of the Revolution, an Irish-born general who marched an army north into Canada in 1775 and died in the snow at the gates of Quebec on the last day of that year. His widow, Janet Livingston Montgomery, never remarried. In 1802 she settled on this land above the Hudson and set about building an estate she first called Chateau de Montgomery, a country home that carried her husband's name into the landscape.

Janet was more than a grieving widow. She ran a serious commercial nursery and orchard business on the property, one of the earliest of its kind in the region, shipping fruit trees and plants up and down the river. When she died in 1828 the estate passed to her brother's line, and the Livingston family would hold and improve it for the rest of the 19th century and well into the 20th.

The original house was a restrained Federal-style block, but in the 1840s the Livingstons brought in Alexander Jackson Davis, the most celebrated country-house architect of his day, to transform it. Davis wrapped the house in columned porches and pavilions and gave it the airy, classical grandeur of the romantic era, turning a plain farmhouse into a mansion designed to converse with its dramatic river setting. It is the only surviving neoclassical country house of its kind by Davis, and the most intact Hudson River estate house of its generation.

The grounds got the same romantic treatment. Drives were laid to open sudden views of the Catskills, a formal garden was planted, trails were cut through the woods along the Saw Kill with its small waterfalls, and the working orchard was kept going. The result is a designed landscape meant to be experienced as a series of pictures, exactly the way estate builders of the picturesque age intended.

The Livingston descendants held Montgomery Place until the 1980s, when they sold it to the preservation group Historic Hudson Valley. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1992, recognized as a nationally significant survival of an early American country estate, from the mansion down to the gardens, farm buildings, and grounds.

In 2016 the estate came to Bard College, whose campus adjoins it, and Montgomery Place entered a new life as both a living part of the college and a landscape open to the public. Visitors can walk the trails and gardens, look out over the river, and, on scheduled tours and program days, step inside the house that a widow built to remember a fallen general two hundred years ago.

Montgomery Place lies just north of Red Hook, off River Road, a few minutes from the college's main campus in Annandale-on-Hudson. Come for the grounds first: the lawns and columned porch above the river, the formal gardens, the woodland paths to the Saw Kill falls, and the orchard, which is at its best in spring bloom and again in the apple weeks of fall. Because it is part of an active campus, hours and access can shift around the academic calendar and events, so it is worth checking before a long drive.

Give yourself a couple of unhurried hours to walk the property and take in the view that made the Livingstons fall for this bluff in the first place. Pair it with the nearby villages of Red Hook and Rhinebeck for a meal, and you have the makings of a classic slow day in the Hudson Valley, history and river and mountains all within a short drive.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.